Kenma Kozume | 1v1

By the time Kenma got home, the sun had already disappeared behind Tokyo's skyline, leaving the windows of his apartment reflecting more of the room than the city beyond them. He dropped his keys into the ceramic dish near the door, kicked off his shoes, and stood there for a moment longer than necessary, staring blankly at nothing while his brain made the slow transition from work to not work. The office hadn't been particularly unbearable today. Meetings, emails, numbers, people stopping beside his desk to ask questions they could have answered themselves if they'd stared at the problem for another thirty seconds. Normal. Predictable. Exhausting in the specific way social interaction had always exhausted him, even if twenty-three-year-old Kenma was considerably better at hiding it than the version of himself who used to avoid eye contact with half the Nekoma volleyball team.

His phone vibrated in his pocket.

Kenma pulled it out, glanced at the notification, and immediately put it back.

Kuroo.

Whatever it was could wait.

He changed out of the clothes he'd worn to the office and into an oversized hoodie and loose sweatpants, pulled his hair back just enough to keep the longer pieces from falling into his eyes, grabbed a drink from the refrigerator, and eventually wandered toward the room containing the gaming setup that probably cost more than his first apartment had. The routine had become almost embarrassingly consistent. Work. Home. Food whenever he remembered it. Computer. Sometimes a stream if one was scheduled, sometimes another hour or two of work if something needed his attention, but most nights he eventually ended up here regardless.

Tonight, thankfully, there was no stream.

No camera.

No thousands of people watching his face and clipping every mildly interesting reaction he made.

Just Kenma.

He dropped into his chair, tucked one leg beneath himself, and woke his computer.

Discord opened automatically.

Kenma barely paid attention as servers populated along the side of the screen, most of them permanently muted. Work servers. Gaming communities. Industry groups he'd joined because someone had told him he should and subsequently never looked at again. His cursor moved past all of them until it reached the small private server buried among the noise.

That one was different.

There weren't thousands of members there. There weren't even hundreds. It was deliberately small, populated by the handful of people Kenma actually liked enough to give unrestricted access to him when he wasn't working or performing for an audience. Kuroo was there, obviously. A few friends he'd accumulated over the years. People who understood that seeing Kenma online wasn't an invitation to demand his attention.

And one username that had been there longer than almost everything else in his adult life.

Kenma's eyes found it automatically.

Online.

Of course.

The corner of his mouth moved almost imperceptibly.

There was something strangely comforting about that little green circle. The username attached to it had survived high school, volleyball practices, graduation, university, his first attempts at streaming, the ridiculous acceleration of his career, Bouncing Ball Corp, and every increasingly bizarre stage of his life afterward. Games had come and gone. Accounts had been abandoned. Friends lists had gradually become digital graveyards full of people who hadn't logged in for six years.

That username remained.

Kenma couldn't remember the exact night they'd met anymore. Some multiplayer lobby during high school. They'd been good. More importantly, they hadn't been annoying. Kenma had sent a friend request, or maybe they'd sent one first, and somehow an interaction that should have lasted one evening stretched into years.

They played games.

They messaged.

Sometimes they talked every night for weeks. Sometimes neither contacted the other for a month, only to resume a conversation as though the gap hadn't happened. Kenma had complained to them about volleyball, school, Kuroo, work, streaming, terrible teammates, bad dates, worse meetings, and occasionally things he hadn't felt like saying aloud to anyone else. They'd watched his life transform from the comfortable distance of a screen and, somehow, never changed with it.

They'd never asked him for anything.

Kenma appreciated that more than he'd ever told them.

There was only one unusual thing about a friendship that had otherwise become so familiar Kenma barely questioned it anymore.

He didn't actually know who they were.

No real name. No face. No photographs. No video calls. He didn't know where exactly they lived or what they did when they weren't appearing online. He'd gathered pieces over the years, naturally, but nothing that could assemble into an identifiable person.

He didn't even know what they sounded like.

Kenma had heard Kuroo complain about that once.

You've known this person for how many years and you've never even talked to them?

They talked.

They just typed.

Kenma had never cared enough about the distinction to push the issue. If they didn't want to use voice chat, they didn't want to use voice chat. He understood better than most people how irritating it was when someone decided privacy was an obstacle they were entitled to overcome.

His gaze moved toward the voice channels, then stopped. Kenma blinked. The familiar username wasn't sitting beneath the usual text channel. It was inside one of the private voice rooms. He stared at it. That was new.

There were three other people in the channel, all names he recognized from the server, and beside each one the familiar little indicators occasionally flashed as someone spoke.

Including theirs.

Kenma straightened slightly.

The icon lit up.

Went dark.

Lit up again.

His cursor hovered over the channel.

For years, they'd never joined voice chat. Not once. They'd played games with Kenma while he spoke aloud and responded entirely through text. They'd sat in streams without identifying themselves. They'd been invited into calls and declined without explanation. Eventually everyone had simply accepted it as one of those peculiar boundaries that didn't need an explanation.

Apparently tonight was different. Kenma should have left it alone, instead, curiosity won.

He clicked.

The connection tone sounded softly through his headphones.

Conversation spilled immediately into his ears, overlapping voices and laughter already halfway through something he had no context for. Someone was telling a story. Another person interrupted. Kenma remained silent, eyes drifting across the names as he listened, trying to determine which voice belonged to which person.

Then the familiar username lit up.

Someone laughed.

Soft and bright, close enough to the microphone that the sound came through clearly, followed by a voice Kenma had never heard before.

A woman's voice.

Kenma went completely still.

His eyes fixed on the username glowing beneath the voice channel. Seven years, he had known them for seven years. And for the first time, the faceless person who had existed behind that username suddenly had a voice.

A girl?